Degrees of separation - A member of the JFK generation connects the dots

Published: Sunday, November 24, 2013 at 09:48 AM.

Social media can provide self-entertainment, and I entertained myself last week by posting about a few of my quirky connections to the JFK story.

I have nothing of real substance to add to the account of the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy by assassin Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, especially if you’ve been watching the nonstop TV retrospectives about that terrible moment. My accounts — which I flippantly labeled “Potter’s Strange But True JFK Stories” — are nothing more than personal oddities.

I started with one tale, which led to another, which led to another, and pretty soon I was feeling a little like Forrest Gump, author Winston Groom’s epic character who had a way of participating in some of history’s greatest moments. (Groom, by the way, was a familiar figure in Jacksonville back in the pre-Gump 1980s when he was researching a book about Marine Pfc. Bobby Garwood, the former Vietnam POW later convicted of collaboration. But that’s an oddity for another day.)

The Kennedy assassination has always captivated me, as it has many people of my generation. I was 8 years old at the time, old enough to understand and be frightened by the enormity of those historic days in November 1963. I was sitting in a classroom in Goldsboro, and school was dismissed early when the news broke. I vaguely remember the blasts of sirens throughout the city.

I remember waiting for the Goldsboro News-Argus to be delivered so we could see the historic headlines. I recall that local TV stations stayed on the air around the clock, unheard of in the day, and my mother and I were transfixed by the coverage. We were watching our small black-and-white set when Oswald was shot by Jack Ruby on live TV. I darted into the neighborhood shouting, “Oswald’s been shot,” relaying the news at a young age.

My odd connections to the story through the years range from personal trivia to connections to people who really do have significant roles in the JFK story.

My first entry was pure trivia. Freedom Communications, former corporate owners of The Daily News, held a publishers and editors conference in Dallas in 2007, and the highlight of the meeting was a dinner in the Sixth Floor Museum at the former Texas School Book Depository. Banquet tables were set up and prime rib was served along the infamous row of windows overlooking Elm Street, where JFK was shot.

I sat with Freedom’s CEO at the time, Scott Flanders, because we liked to talk about college basketball anytime we had a chance. Our table was within plain view of the reconstructed sniper’s nest, no more than 30 feet away, at the corner window. The whole occasion was more than a little surreal.

Flanders, who is now Playboy’s CEO, asked me during dinner why Kinston’s Patrick Holmes and I were called “associate publisher” when we basically held down the job of a publisher. One thing led to another, and eventually Flanders tapped his water glass to get everyone’s attention. He announced that Patrick and I were receiving battlefield promotions to full publishers. It was a proud moment in an eerie locale.

Strange Story No. 2 harkened back to my childhood in Goldsboro during the years shortly after the JFK assassination. A single father and struggling musician in town named Dick Holler became a familiar figure in our household for a period of a year or so.

He had connected with my grandmother, and his sons Dickie and David frequently stayed at our house, sometimes for weeks, while Dick was out of town pursuing his musical dreams as a songwriter.

When Dick Holler was in Goldsboro, he treated me like one of his boys. One Sunday afternoon at his home, he sat with me and watched an NFL football game, patiently explaining the rules of the sport.

He is one of the nicest people I’ve ever met. When he was out of town and called to speak with his sons, he also would have them put me on the phone.

Holler spent a lot of time in Florida working on an album with a band called the Royal Guardsmen. They had recorded one of Holler’s songs, “Snoopy vs. The Red Baron,” and it became a huge hit — No. 2 on the charts only because the Monkees had “I’m a Believer­” out at the time.

Here’s the JFK connection: A few years after Holler had moved from Goldsboro, in 1968, he wrote the generational anthem “Abraham, Martin and John” with the famous lines, “Has anybody here, seen my old friend John? Can you tell me where he’s gone?”

It’s a simple but poignant song — first recorded by Dion; later by Marvin Gaye and Whitney Houston. It has special meaning to me. Thanks to Dick Holler, I also have a life-long love for football, and I usually understand it.

The third story occurred on another trip to Dallas, this time accompanied by my son Jake. Jake and I were visiting Dealey Plaza, site of the infamous grassy knoll and a mecca for conspiracy theorists. All sorts of people gather there, some with loose grips on reality. I was accosted that day by one of the crackpots, who accused me of being with the CIA and wanted me to leave immediately. I grabbed Jake and walked away from the guy as soon as I could, figuring there had been enough violence in that vicinity for several lifetimes.

Jake also was with me for Strange But True JFK Story No. 4. Our family made a vacation trip to New York City in the blistering summer of 1999. We were in Yankee Stadium on the night of July 15, 1999, seated along the right-field line, for a Yankees-Braves game.

Seated not far away was John F. Kennedy Jr., a beloved figure in all of America­ since his salute to his dad’s casket as a toddler in 1963. He was a favorite son in New York. The stadium crowd cheered when his image flashed on the Jumbotron during the game.

The next night, Kennedy attempted to pilot a small plane from New Jersey to Martha’s Vineyard for a wedding, but he never made it. Along with his wife and sister-in-law, he died when the plane went down that hazy summer evening,

For the rest of the Potter family vacation, New York City was in a state of shock. The screaming headlines of the city’s tabloids and shocking news tickers at Times Square were reminiscent of a time nearly 36 years earlier.

My fifth and final story doesn’t qualify as strange. It’s the real deal, involving my short working relationship with one of the central journalistic figures of the Kennedy assassination, Bob Jackson.

In 1963, Bob was a photographer for the Dallas Times Herald and part of the press corps covering Kennedy’s visit. He was in the basement of the Dallas police station for Oswald’s transfer and snapped a picture at the very moment Jack Ruby stuck a revolver into the accused killer’s stomach. That picture won Jackson a Pulitzer Prize and a lasting place in history.

When I knew him in Colorado Springs in 1981, Bob still had one of the best eyes in photojournalism. We spent quite a few Saturdays together at the offices of the Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph, where he was a staff photographer and I was assistant city editor.

I was in charge of laying out pages and ran Jackson’s pictures as large as possible. Newspaper photographers really like that. Once I stretched Jackson’s photo of horses frolicking in snow in Green Mountain Falls all the way across the page; we never had a problem striking up a conversation after that.

He didn’t dwell on the JFK story, but he would talk about it if asked.

What I have always found most interesting about Jackson’s story was his overlooked part as a witness to the actual assassination. He was one of maybe two or three credible people who distinctly saw someone with a rifle in the depository window on Nov. 22, 1963. Jackson lamented that he didn’t have film in his camera at that moment, though his eyewitness testimony before the Warren Commission provided critical evidence.

Jackson had a stellar career, but his dramatic photograph from 50 years ago today in Dallas overshadows his other work.

When I watch a JFK documentary, I still think about Bob Jackson — and Dick Holler; my crazy Dealey Plaza experience; JFK Jr.’s penultimate night; and my own slice of personal history on the sixth floor of the old Texas School Book Depository.

That’s a little strange, I know, but true.

Elliott Potter is publisher and executive editor of The Daily News.

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Social media can provide self-entertainment, and I entertained myself last week by posting about a few of my quirky connections to the JFK story.

I have nothing of real substance to add to the account of the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy by assassin Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, especially if you’ve been watching the nonstop TV retrospectives about that terrible moment. My accounts — which I flippantly labeled “Potter’s Strange But True JFK Stories” — are nothing more than personal oddities.

I started with one tale, which led to another, which led to another, and pretty soon I was feeling a little like Forrest Gump, author Winston Groom’s epic character who had a way of participating in some of history’s greatest moments. (Groom, by the way, was a familiar figure in Jacksonville back in the pre-Gump 1980s when he was researching a book about Marine Pfc. Bobby Garwood, the former Vietnam POW later convicted of collaboration. But that’s an oddity for another day.)

The Kennedy assassination has always captivated me, as it has many people of my generation. I was 8 years old at the time, old enough to understand and be frightened by the enormity of those historic days in November 1963. I was sitting in a classroom in Goldsboro, and school was dismissed early when the news broke. I vaguely remember the blasts of sirens throughout the city.

I remember waiting for the Goldsboro News-Argus to be delivered so we could see the historic headlines. I recall that local TV stations stayed on the air around the clock, unheard of in the day, and my mother and I were transfixed by the coverage. We were watching our small black-and-white set when Oswald was shot by Jack Ruby on live TV. I darted into the neighborhood shouting, “Oswald’s been shot,” relaying the news at a young age.

My odd connections to the story through the years range from personal trivia to connections to people who really do have significant roles in the JFK story.

My first entry was pure trivia. Freedom Communications, former corporate owners of The Daily News, held a publishers and editors conference in Dallas in 2007, and the highlight of the meeting was a dinner in the Sixth Floor Museum at the former Texas School Book Depository. Banquet tables were set up and prime rib was served along the infamous row of windows overlooking Elm Street, where JFK was shot.

I sat with Freedom’s CEO at the time, Scott Flanders, because we liked to talk about college basketball anytime we had a chance. Our table was within plain view of the reconstructed sniper’s nest, no more than 30 feet away, at the corner window. The whole occasion was more than a little surreal.

Flanders, who is now Playboy’s CEO, asked me during dinner why Kinston’s Patrick Holmes and I were called “associate publisher” when we basically held down the job of a publisher. One thing led to another, and eventually Flanders tapped his water glass to get everyone’s attention. He announced that Patrick and I were receiving battlefield promotions to full publishers. It was a proud moment in an eerie locale.

Strange Story No. 2 harkened back to my childhood in Goldsboro during the years shortly after the JFK assassination. A single father and struggling musician in town named Dick Holler became a familiar figure in our household for a period of a year or so.

He had connected with my grandmother, and his sons Dickie and David frequently stayed at our house, sometimes for weeks, while Dick was out of town pursuing his musical dreams as a songwriter.

When Dick Holler was in Goldsboro, he treated me like one of his boys. One Sunday afternoon at his home, he sat with me and watched an NFL football game, patiently explaining the rules of the sport.

He is one of the nicest people I’ve ever met. When he was out of town and called to speak with his sons, he also would have them put me on the phone.

Holler spent a lot of time in Florida working on an album with a band called the Royal Guardsmen. They had recorded one of Holler’s songs, “Snoopy vs. The Red Baron,” and it became a huge hit — No. 2 on the charts only because the Monkees had “I’m a Believer­” out at the time.

Here’s the JFK connection: A few years after Holler had moved from Goldsboro, in 1968, he wrote the generational anthem “Abraham, Martin and John” with the famous lines, “Has anybody here, seen my old friend John? Can you tell me where he’s gone?”

It’s a simple but poignant song — first recorded by Dion; later by Marvin Gaye and Whitney Houston. It has special meaning to me. Thanks to Dick Holler, I also have a life-long love for football, and I usually understand it.

The third story occurred on another trip to Dallas, this time accompanied by my son Jake. Jake and I were visiting Dealey Plaza, site of the infamous grassy knoll and a mecca for conspiracy theorists. All sorts of people gather there, some with loose grips on reality. I was accosted that day by one of the crackpots, who accused me of being with the CIA and wanted me to leave immediately. I grabbed Jake and walked away from the guy as soon as I could, figuring there had been enough violence in that vicinity for several lifetimes.

Jake also was with me for Strange But True JFK Story No. 4. Our family made a vacation trip to New York City in the blistering summer of 1999. We were in Yankee Stadium on the night of July 15, 1999, seated along the right-field line, for a Yankees-Braves game.

Seated not far away was John F. Kennedy Jr., a beloved figure in all of America­ since his salute to his dad’s casket as a toddler in 1963. He was a favorite son in New York. The stadium crowd cheered when his image flashed on the Jumbotron during the game.

The next night, Kennedy attempted to pilot a small plane from New Jersey to Martha’s Vineyard for a wedding, but he never made it. Along with his wife and sister-in-law, he died when the plane went down that hazy summer evening,

For the rest of the Potter family vacation, New York City was in a state of shock. The screaming headlines of the city’s tabloids and shocking news tickers at Times Square were reminiscent of a time nearly 36 years earlier.

My fifth and final story doesn’t qualify as strange. It’s the real deal, involving my short working relationship with one of the central journalistic figures of the Kennedy assassination, Bob Jackson.

In 1963, Bob was a photographer for the Dallas Times Herald and part of the press corps covering Kennedy’s visit. He was in the basement of the Dallas police station for Oswald’s transfer and snapped a picture at the very moment Jack Ruby stuck a revolver into the accused killer’s stomach. That picture won Jackson a Pulitzer Prize and a lasting place in history.

When I knew him in Colorado Springs in 1981, Bob still had one of the best eyes in photojournalism. We spent quite a few Saturdays together at the offices of the Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph, where he was a staff photographer and I was assistant city editor.

I was in charge of laying out pages and ran Jackson’s pictures as large as possible. Newspaper photographers really like that. Once I stretched Jackson’s photo of horses frolicking in snow in Green Mountain Falls all the way across the page; we never had a problem striking up a conversation after that.

He didn’t dwell on the JFK story, but he would talk about it if asked.

What I have always found most interesting about Jackson’s story was his overlooked part as a witness to the actual assassination. He was one of maybe two or three credible people who distinctly saw someone with a rifle in the depository window on Nov. 22, 1963. Jackson lamented that he didn’t have film in his camera at that moment, though his eyewitness testimony before the Warren Commission provided critical evidence.

Jackson had a stellar career, but his dramatic photograph from 50 years ago today in Dallas overshadows his other work.

When I watch a JFK documentary, I still think about Bob Jackson — and Dick Holler; my crazy Dealey Plaza experience; JFK Jr.’s penultimate night; and my own slice of personal history on the sixth floor of the old Texas School Book Depository.